Wikipedia pages should get a lot quicker very soon as the foundation behind the world’s largest and most popular encyclopedia have turned on Lua, a lightweight scripting engine, to speed up access to complex pages. And the site is asking its editors and contributors to learn the new programming language to help make the site quicker.

Those who have ever edited Wikipedia pages will know that the site, like many wikis, uses “Wikitext language” — a sort of a simplified HTML — to enable users to add content chunks, templates, and formatting to a page.

But there was a problem, as Wikimedia’s Sumana Harihareswara posted recently:

But because we’d never planned for wikitext to become a programming language, these templates were terribly inefficient and hacky — they didn’t even have recursion or loops — and were terrible for performance. When you edit a complex article like Tulsi Gabbard, with scores of citations, it can take up to 30 seconds to parse and display the page.

Lua is an embedded scripting language, built so that lightweight but powerful code can be embedded right into web pages. It’s often used as a scripting engine for games. And it’s much quicker than Wikipedia’s existing wikitext solution.

The big question is, of course, is how Wikipedians will take to the new language, which is unfamiliar and potentially more complex than wikitext. And will we start encountering bugs on Wikipedia pages as editors and maintainers now become programmers?

“Now is the first time that the Wikimedia site maintainers have enabled real coding that affects all readers. We’re letting people program Wikipedia unsupervised,” Harihareswara wrote. “Anyone can write a chunk of code to be included in an article that will be seen by millions of people, often without much review. We are taking our “anyone can edit” maxim one big step forward.”

And, she added, that if any Wikipedia user doesn’t look the load time of a page, they can now do something about and improve it themselves, in a very Wikipedian way:

“Just as we crowdsourced building Wikipedia, now we’re crowdsourcing bits of infrastructure improvement. And this kind of massively multiplayer, crowdsourced performance improvement is uniquely us.”

The read-write revolution continues.

photo credit: Stewart via photopin cc

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Information may want to be free, but the organization behind Wikipedia wants knowledge to be free, too. So Wikimedia has formed a partnership with the world’s sixth-largest telecom, VimpelCom, to deliver Wikipedia mobile sites for free to developing countries.

It’s part of the Wikipedia Zero program, which is the project to deliver Wikipedia “free of data charges” on mobile devices in developing countries.

“The world’s sixth-largest telecommunications company and fifth-largest website globally are coming together to offer our customers a better mobile experience and greater access to free knowledge, particularly in emerging markets,” Mikhail Gerchuk, VimpelCom’s chief strategy officer, said in a statement.

You’ve probably never heard of VimpelCom — the organization typically does business under other brands, such as Wind and Mobilink — but the telecom has a strong presence in Russia, former Eastern bloc countries, parts of south-east Asia, and Africa, with 212 million subscribers in a service area with 780 million people.

With this partnership, Wikipedia Zero now will be providing free access to 330 million mobile users around the world, Wikimedia’s Kul Takanao Wadhwa said, adding that it was an important step towards the organizations’ ultimate goal: “free knowledge to everyone on the planet.”

The 18 countries that VimpelCom is bringing onboard include Russia, Italy, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Cambodia, Laos, Algeria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burundi, Zimbabwe, and the Central African Republic.

The roll out will start this year, Wikimedia said, with a focus on Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa.

photo credit: Absolute Chaos via photopin cc

Comparing what people find interesting is a fascinating cross-cultural exercise. When we want to learn more about any given topic, many of us go first to Wikipedia, which is why a report detailing the most viewed articles in 2012, broken down by language, is a revealing glimpse into different mindsets, values, and ways of life around the world.

The English-speaking world is drawn to technology, entertainment, and death. Facebook is the most-viewed page with 32.6 million views, and more than 25 million people looked up “Deaths in 2012.” Half of the top 10 centered on blockbuster films, an English-Irish boy band, and Fifty Shades of Grey.

Bad American television is apparently a significant point of interest to Europeans. Top pages in Spanish, German, French and Italian include How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, Grey’s Anatomy, Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, and Game of Thrones (although I consider Game of Thrones to be riveting television.) One Direction, the aforementioned English-Irish boy band, popped up on just about every European language list. I have yet to decide if my complete and total ignorance of this group is an embarrassing sign of age or a testament to maturity. Let’s go with the latter.

A majority of the highly viewed pages in Arabic are about historical, religious, and political figures, while the Russians are intrigued by Internet phenomena such as YouTube, social networks, and online porn. The Brazilians (and other Portuguese speakers) tend to look up information about sports, singers, and social networks.

The findings vary greatly across Asia by country. In Japan, the top three most popular pages are about actresses and female pop music groups. While the Chinese are primarily drawn to information about technology and business, they are also, it seems, intrigued by Japanese actresses. The Thais primarily use Wikipedia to look up geographical information, while the Vietnamese use the encyclopedia to learn about the birds and the bees. “List of sex positions” tops the most viewed pages, joined by “sex” and “genitals of women.” Naughty, naughty.

These findings were culled from the Wikimedia Toolserver, a collection of 13 servers that host the Wikimedia databases. View the full report.

The contest is Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, and it’s focused on photos of historic sites around the world. Last year’s contest saw 168,000 pictures uploaded by more than 5,000 photographers from 18 European nations. This year, volunteers in more than 30 countries, including the U.S., will join in as organizers attempt to surpass that total.

The Wikipedia Commons is already one of the world’s largest repositories of freely usable images, with  13.6 million media files. But there are substantial gaps in the database, according to Lodewijk Gelauff, one of the organizers of the first Wiki Loves Photos contest in 2010. No freely usable pictures exist of many world heritage sites, culturally significant monuments, and notable buildings around the world.

“Wiki Loves Monuments is an important way for volunteers around the world to showcase the cultural heritage in their countries and share these images with everyone through Wikipedia,” Gelauff said in a Wikimedia Foundation blog post.

All submitted photos will be added to the Commons, which means that anyone can use them for any purpose, as long as the photographer is credited. Ten finalists and one grand prize winner will be announced in December, and the winner will receive a trip to Hong Kong to shoot a photo tour in conjunction with Wikimania 2013.

“By uploading your photos, you are sharing our national heritage with everybody in America and in the rest of the world. The photos will be free to use, and free of cost, forever,” said Peter Ekman, the national coordinator for the U.S. contest.

A Wikimedia app is available on Google Play that contestants can use to both locate monuments of interest and enter photographs into the contest, directly from their Android smartphones.

Participating countries include India, Russia, South Africa, Argentina, the Phillipines, and Brazil, plus all of North America and almost all of Europe.

Americans can contribute here, and international contributors can submit photos at wikilovesmonuments.org.

Image credit: Sfmontyo/WikiMedia